turner (02/17/83)
#N:ucbesvax:4300003:000:2281 ucbesvax!turner Feb 16 16:29:00 1983 A breakfast joint that I go to occasionally (Egg Shop & Apple Press, to those of you who might know.) recently had the misfortune of falling under new management. Along came a new whiz-bang electronic cash register with god-only-knows how many uP's in its tortuous innards. This dismaying piece of garbage had several features which we ergonomically regressive in comparison to the old (quaint but trusty) electro-mechanical register that they had so hastily disposed of. One had to lean over the keys to shadow them from glare, for example; the handy plastic crud-shield over the keyboard helped matters not at all. The key functions themselves were obscure and hard to remember. It had a nice printer, which gave detailed reports on the bills, and probably helped the accountant a lot. But that's about all. The waiting help were required to memorize alphanumeric codes instead of prices, and this seemed to increase the number of trips to the register, and the time spent there. In short, electronics is making life more frustrating for some people. To get to the point: most of these problems came out of a poor scaling of performance and functionality against quality of interface. You could get the register to do a lot more things, but simple things were made commensurately more difficult. I'm glad to see some thinking here about the applications environment of graphics. Graphics could have helped here, assuming that one could build it into something like a cash-register at a reasonable cost. Graphics could also have made things even worse. I would like to have seen something with a small-but-decent screen, with enough touch- sensitivity to point to key-sized icons, and hierarchical menus to avoid cluttering the screen with infrequently-used or obscurely-shift- encoded functions. A character-mapped screen (say 30x10) with a graphics font-extension would have been quite adequate. And everything available by simple pointing. Thoughts on this? Not that I want to get into product design here. But we should all be aware of the extent to which we are doing work- design when making something for someone else to use. Michael Turner